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App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

rogueengine.io

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Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#161

Post by coip »

thot_experiment wrote: post #159

I man don't get me wrong, I love the idea of PWAs but this dude is out to lunch. It's so painful making anything complex work cross browser/cross platform. On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You definitely can't Bluetooth outside of Chrome (probably only on Android and Windows too because nothing fun is ever allowed on Macs). Multiplayer games you kind of need UDP. You cannot UDP in th…

I have several PWAs on my home screen on a iPhone that open in a window that doesn’t appear as a browser.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#163

Post by Neywiny »

guzik wrote: post #83

I'd give anything to move our apps to the web. We're in the medical field (our apps connect to medical devices over Bluetooth), so publishing on Google Play is like a Kafkaesque fever dream. Two days ago they tell us our app fits into categories like: Activity and Fitness Nutrition and Weight Management Sleep Management Medical Device Apps So we gotta update our policies, but today they said something like: "Actually…

Looks like at least chromium has web Bluetooth. Could that work?

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#164

Post by mattgreenrocks »

FredPret wrote: post #145
guzik wrote: post #83

I'd give anything to move our apps to the web. We're in the medical field (our apps connect to medical devices over Bluetooth), so publishing on Google Play is like a Kafkaesque fever dream. Two days ago they tell us our app fits into categories like: Activity and Fitness Nutrition and Weight Management Sleep Management Medical Device Apps So we gotta update our policies, but today they said something like: "Actually…

The web is just a beautiful publishing platform. - no permission needed (mostly) - built-in discoverability - you get to figure out whatever payment processing you want - works on every device - update code in seconds - no copy protection needed

Developing apps on it still seems really, really primitive. HTML alone is not sufficient for a decent looking UI. Tailwind directives gunk it up rapidly. Component frameworks help some but still don’t seem quite as nice as something like SwiftUI. Server side functionality still requires a lot of manual serialization/deserialization (unless you use the newer crop of frameworks that have figured out this is pure noise).

And then there’s JS.

Rails, htmx, and a few others seem like the only ones who really get that a simple web app should be 50-100loc.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#165

Post by amelius »

mjmsmith wrote: post #126
amelius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A well implemented (native) app is always better than a well implemented web site. No, because it fails to support the feature of running virtually anywhere. For many people this is the #1 feature. Everything else is just icing on the cake. Who cares about an app that is 2x faster but doesn't run?

> For many people this is the #1 feature. Everything else is just icing on the cake. I hear this sentiment from developers much more than non-developers. I wonder what percentage of developers do all their work within a browser.

Non developers typically don't think about these things. They just suffer them subconsciously or accept the situation as something they can never change anyway and go on with their lives. You have to ask them to find out.

And I also hear developers complain more about performance issues than non developers.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#166

Post by deadbabe »

bdcravens wrote: post #93

Meetings should be emails Youtube content should be a blog React websites should be static with sprinkles of vanilla JS etc These are all ideas that in many cases are true, though sometimes they aren't, but if you ask the right questions, usually those holding the line have a financial incentive.

I actually don’t think it’s always financial.

I understand better now that by forcing a more complex medium you will inherently attract a consumer who has greater commitment to your content.

A person getting an email isn’t as locked in as a person who is attending a zoom meeting. And a person in a zoom meeting isn’t as locked in as a person forced to physically attend a meeting.

You could make your YouTube channel a blog but now you’ll mostly attract an audience that has a greater chance of getting their attention consumed by something shinier, like another YouTube channel.

Therefore, you will always want to deliver a message through the most complicated medium that still lets you attract a suitable audience. It creates more hooks for people to latch onto.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#167

Post by averageRoyalty »

bdcravens wrote: post #88
tannedNerd wrote: post #81

Cool, but web apps still can’t do location tracking in the background. So please do tell me how my fitness app should be a web app instead?

Does your app still function if the user disables location sharing?

Regardless of the answer, it's very common for people to wish to share their workouts, locations included.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#168

Post by kebokyo »

xcv123 wrote: post #104
rubymamis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that mentality is that you start seeing inefficiencies spring everywhere (why loading Discord takes so long? Slack? etc, etc).

It’s a third world mindset where we end up with the software equivalent of public defecation, living in squalor and filth.

How is Discord not loading fast enough the result of a “third world mindset”? Is this one of those “this software is bad because it was made in China / India / outsourced to one of those countries” arguments (which I don’t even think applies to this topic???)

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#169

Post by ndileas »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #151
ndileas wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look at these things as essentially aesthetic preferences. There's certainly cases where a certain medium is the objectively right one for a task, but there's many others where it really just a matter of taste.

I actually think of them as more than just an aesthetic preference. It is fundamentally about proof of work. Something that will become more and more important as we move into a post AI world. Every single piece of art, music, game or any other creative piece, has three things to it. One, the actual artifact itself of the music, the art and the game. Second is who is making it. And the third is how much have they put…

That's a interesting way of thinking of it, but a little limited. For most, the proof of work aspect becomes just another part of the the status competition. I think I'm a little more optimistic about the future.

Also, there's definitely web games (paperclips, kittens) and art in every media that are memorable and excellent to someone. That's kind of the point that I was making; the medium is part of the message, but many things can be presented in different ways, and mostly this doesn't detract from anyone else.

Fundamentally, I reject your model of art; I personally think the actual artifact should be the most important part. Anything else shouldn't even be considered as far as we're able, even though we are mostly status seeking monkeys who pay very close attention to every other monkey's status so as to increase our status.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#170

Post by kebokyo »

rubymamis wrote: post #22

While the web platform is catching up due to the continuous supply of abstractions by modern browsers, once you must deviate from those abstractions, you quickly find yourself needing to implement something yourself that is much less efficient than a native implementation. I wrote about developing my own block editor from scratch[1] using C++ and QML after finding that Notion (and so many other web apps) are extremel…

I am so happy that you made this, legit. I’m absolutely going to try it whenever I get a chance.

I’ve wanted to do the same thing you did but with coding notebooks (e. Jupyter) for a while now. It frustrates me to no end that the only native software for notebooks is JetBrains IDEA (and even that’s only an “I think it’s naive” lol). Hopefully I can take what you learned and documented and apply it to my app ^-^

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